Divine hiddenness in Hinduism

The problem of divine hiddenness, in Schellenberg's modern form, requires specific premises that do not map cleanly onto Hindu thought. It assumes a God who is a distinct person with specific intentions, including the intention to be in relationship with all non-resistant creatures. Most Hindu traditions — especially Advaita Vedanta — do not posit a God of quite this sort. Brahman is the ground of being rather than a person with intentions; Ishvara, when treated personally, is often regarded as a saguna (with-attributes) manifestation of the nirguna (without-attributes) Absolute.

The Hindu framework replaces hiddenness with maya. The divine is not absent from the world; it is the world, rightly understood. But maya — the veil of appearance, the cosmic illusion, the structure of cognitive habits that make us mistake plurality for ultimate reality — prevents us from seeing this. The problem, on this reading, is not divine hiddenness but self-hiddenness: we fail to recognize what is present because of our own cognitive and karmic conditioning. The remedy is not more evidence but different practice — jnana yoga (knowledge), bhakti yoga (devotion), karma yoga (action), or raja yoga (meditation).

Theistic Hindu traditions — Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, the Vaishnava and Shaiva Bhakti schools — are closer to the Abrahamic framing and have their own versions of divine hiddenness. Ramanuja treats God's occasional withdrawal as a pedagogical strategy: deepening the devotee's longing. Madhva's Dvaita treats it as a feature of the distinction between God and souls. The Schellenbergian challenge — what about sincere seekers who remain in the dark? — is answered in Hindu theism by appeals to karma from previous lives and to the long span of spiritual development over many rebirths. This is, critics note, a move structurally similar to skeptical theism: it defuses the problem by making divine timing epistemically inscrutable.